


Honey, If You Stay I’ll Be Forgiven

by Deafen_the_Satellites



Series: Still How the Strong Survive [2]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Anxiety, Awesome Natasha Romanov, BAMF Natasha Romanov, Brainwashing, Child Soldiers, Darkly Hilarious Bucky-Recovery Irony, Discussion of past:, Drug Use, F/M, Gen, M/M, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Natasha-centric, POV Natasha Romanov, PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Rape, Red Room (Marvel), Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Suicidal Ideation, Torture, UST, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Violent Sex, Violent sexual fantasies, comic backstory canon remix, comic canon compliant-ish for Natasha, dub con, institutional gaslighting, mcu canon compliant, non con, nonconsensual medical procedures, pregnancy loss, story time with our favorite ex-assassins, this one time at assassin camp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-22 03:24:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8270761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deafen_the_Satellites/pseuds/Deafen_the_Satellites
Summary: “To be honest, Bucky, I don’t know how old I am… I lose my timeline. I have flashes of memories that don’t add up… I know what it’s like to have your head fucked with, to not be able to trust your own memories and wonder what else it is you don’t remember.”Our favorite former assassins compare notes late one night.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from My Chemical Romance’s _Famous Last Words ___
> 
> Many thanks to[Femme_Daltia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Femme_Daltia) the Steve to my Nat, my ever patient beta, who helped turn this from the Natasha Monologues (let’s be honest, when it comes to free associating as Natasha, I could, in fact, do this all day.) into a coherent story. She got me started on this fic through a series of in-character text/gchat conversations because best friends are the ones who still play pretend with you.  
>   
>  This is our first literary collaboration but far from our first creative endeavor. Together, in the decade we’ve known each other we’ve made theater magic, faced down bureaucracy, gone into battle, fenced on rooftops, laughed, cried and run around NYC, NOLA, and Europe.  
>   
> I hope it goes without saying, but I’m with her till the end of the line.

Natasha woke with a start to a crash and a howl coming from the next room. Right on schedule. She tossed off the blanket and hurried from Steve’s couch to his room. She opened the door cautiously to find Bucky sitting up, struggling out of the sheets, wide-eyed and gasping.

“Shit, Nat, did I wake you up? Sorry, I’m sorry-“

“Hey! It’s fine. I was coming back from the bathroom and I heard. Nightmares?”

“Yeah.” He leaned over to pick up the pieces of the shattered lamp from the bedside table but was shaking too badly, sweat slicking his right hand, to hold on to them. His new, artificially skin-sheathed, Wakandan engineered left hand could warm realistically and didn’t produce sweat, but wasn't as dexterous and the pressure sensors were only as precise as Bucky's concentration. The shards exploded in a shower of ceramic dust and splinters, skittering off the edge of the nightstand and onto the carpet.

'Shit”, he cursed, his voice tinny and strained and suspiciously wet.

“Take it easy. You want me to call Steve?” Nat asked carefully, “He can be here in twenty—”  
  
“No! Don’t.” Bucky was quick to interject. “God, he lives through enough of these nights. I don’t want his next ulcer named after me.” He abandoned his futile attempts at cleaning with a defeated sigh. He had made progress with the new arm but at this instant he was not in an optimal frame of mind to practice fine motor control.

“He figures he gave you enough of them all those nights you watched over him when he was sick. I think he’d rather this than the loneliness of the last few years before he found you again.  It gives him something more constructive to be stoic over.”

“Dumb punk always had a martyr complex,” he grumbled, pulling back the damp strands of his hair with the elastic they had escaped from. He crossed his legs and leaned his elbows on his knees, looking down at the sweaty crumpled sheets.

“Still, he’s got enough dragging at him lately. He deserves one night without this. He puts up a good front for me but half the time he looks like two cents worth of God-help-you. Told him the other night that between the endless rounds of phone calls with the lawyers and the 3 A.M. wake-up calls, courtesy of yours truly thrashing in my sleep, it's a wonder he hasn't given himself an asthma attack.

I know he doesn’t get asthma attacks anymore but the sheer fact that I remembered and was concerned seemed to make him feel better. It's been rough going though. As you know.”

And Natasha did know. It had been a rough few months for them all. After the Raft break, Steve had originally planned to flee back to Wakanda with Wanda, Sam, Scott, and Clint, but, unsurprisingly, things hadn’t quite gone according to plan. They'd gotten out, but not before the quinjet had sustained damage from the Raft’s automated anti-aircraft system, forcing them to land on American soil rather than risk the Trans-Atlantic crossing. After abandoning the aircraft, they'd had to scramble to put distance between them and pursuing forces. Six weeks later they had still been on the run, crisscrossing North America. 

Meanwhile, Nat had sensed an opportunity and taken a gamble. Cashing in on what contacts and outstanding favors she had left, she had soon found herself paying a diplomatic visit to Wakanda where she had explained to T'Challa Steve’s situation. She claimed to have been in contact with him and that he had appointed her as Bucky's emergency medical proxy in the event of his capture or incapacitation. T’Challa had been skeptical at first, and rightly so, he knew a con when he saw one. However, he had recognized in Natasha a wisdom that favored long-term, big picture solutions. He had also experienced firsthand just how deep Nat's loyalties to Steve ran. The memory of Berlin and the sharp, searing pain of her Widow's Bites were proof enough of that. He had trusted her motives if not, necessarily, her immediate intentions. They were similar in that regard. He had allowed her to make her play at any rate.

“You have chosen a most—opportune—time to pay us a visit Ms. Romanoff.” T’Challa had told her over coffee in his receiving room, a knowing glint in his eye. “As I'm sure you are aware, Sgt. Barnes…was overwhelmed by his recent experiences and chose to return to cyrostasis until we can better assure him of our abilities to mitigate the effects of his conditioning.  I am pleased to say he has options.”

Had Nat been anyone less than herself, she may have faltered under the intensity of T'Challa's scrutiny in that moment. Instead she had replied, “Keeping Barnes safely under your protection made sense leading up to the Raft break.  That went…as well as could be expected. Steve feels we should go ahead and wake him. Let him decide. He wishes he could be here of course, but circumstances being what they are, he doesn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to your involvement, or prolong the risks that we're all taking.”  

Nat had been confident that the sentiment was a true reflection of Steve's thoughts on the matter. That he had never actually put such thoughts into words...well, she had resolved to cross that bridge when she came to it **.** _This was for the best after all._

It was with that thought in mind that Nat had entered the suite set aside for Bucky's recuperation, several hours after he had been awakened. Temping down a twinge of guilt at the sight of him propped up in a hospital bed, swaddled in blankets, bleary-eyed and vulnerable, knowing she would be using him, yet again, she had steeled herself and outlined her plan.    

“This can end without a crisis.  Steve will do whatever he has to for those who depend on him.  But he can only run for so long.  Clint and Scott have families.   The longer we wait, the more those families get drawn into this mess.  I don’t think I have to explain to you how stubborn Steve is. He needs an incentive to come to the bargaining table.  You are that incentive.

I have a plan, but it'll only work if I have your cooperation. Steve and T'Challa won't back down for anything less and then we'd be right back at square one. The doctors here are the best in the world.  Give treatment a chance. You owe that to yourself. We can clear your name along with Steve’s.”

Throughout Nat's delivery, Bucky had sat watching the birds flittering in the trees on the other side of the window. 

Finally, he had responded without taking his eyes from the window, “I went back into cryo because I wasn’t ready. The techs say I slept a week. What makes you think I’m ready now?”

Nat had made her move then, “It’s been awhile since you got between Steve and his bullies. The bullies he’s up against now are some of the worst. He needs your help, even if he doesn’t know it. You spent seven decades in a cage.  Do you want that for Steve?  If this mess escalates, Steve won’t be free for a very long time.

All you need to do is work with the doctors here and see how well you do over the course of the next few weeks. In a month, your doctors will contact me and if you’ve made progress, then _you’ll_ be ready to board a plane when I call you.”

There had been a long silence then. Bucky's face had struggled to remain impassive. She hadn't been able to decide if he had looked more like he'd wanted to throw up, punch someone, or cry.

“Fine.” he had said at last, monotone and distant.

In response, she'd slid three sheets of paper and a pen across the bedside table. “Sign on the dotted line. One for me, one for you, one for his Highness.  This states that you consent to treatment and wish to appoint me as your proxy in all medical matters for the foreseeable future. This will include allowing your treatment team to communicate details of your progress to me.  This—” she'd continued, opening a folder and holding out another sheet, “will transfer this role back to Steve or whomever else you wish to appoint as soon as everyone is back in New York.  This stays with me until then.” 

He had signed the forms and tossed the pen back across the table, never once meeting her eyes. 

Twenty minutes later had seen T’Challa frowning down at the document Nat had handed him, displeased but unsurprised.

“I dislike being misled, Ms. Romanoff”, he had said pointedly. “You told me Captain Rogers had sent you here.”

“I prefer to think of myself as cautiously diplomatic, your Highness, rather than deceitful.  It doesn’t matter how we got here, Sgt. Barnes signed the papers of his own free will.  I think we both know this is preferable to Barnes frozen here indefinitely.  For _all_ parties.” 

“Indeed”, T'Challa had conceded after a moment. “We shall be in touch.  Give my regards to Captain Rogers when you see him.” The pointed arch of one perfect eyebrow had told Nat just how well he had thought _that_ conversation would go.

“I will. Thank you for your generous assistance”, Nat had replied smoothly. She'd lived under the burden of far greater sins longer than anyone knew. Her resolve wasn't easily shaken.

As she had been preparing to leave, he had called out to her, “A moment, please.”

Turning to face him, she had noted that from his desk he looked every bit the ruler he now was.  But the curiosity in his eyes had betrayed his youth. 

“Natasha Romanoff.  Natalia Alianovna Romanova. The Black Widow.  She of many names and faces.  What do you seek to gain from all this?” 

She had paused, her hand on the doorknob. 

“If you could have back the five minutes before the bomb blast killed your father,” she had begun slowly, “wouldn’t you do anything to keep him safe?” 

He had looked away. 

“There you go” she had finished. And with that she'd departed.  All that had been needed to put things in motion afterward had been Stark's backing and an audience with General Ross and the other members of the newly formed regulation entity known as S.H.O.C.

That had been the easy part.

Five weeks later, Natasha had waited for Steve beside the ice machine at an ancient motel in Nebraska.  

“Losing your touch, Romanoff.” Steve had mused wearily, still clutching the empty ice bucket. “Took you long enough”

“I’d have had you outside Akron weeks ago if I didn’t think everyone still needed time to cool off.  Besides, it gave you a chance to grow out that beard. Fugitive is a good look on you.”

She had then presented the truce agreement formed back East. If they agreed to return to New York peacefully, things could be worked out.  Bucky, she had explained, had been woken from cryo and was working with Wakandan neurologists and things looked, if not wholly promising, then less bleak regarding his trigger words.  He could hear various combinations of the words without regressing into the Winter Soldier state, even if the effort it took was grueling.

“Accept the truce, Rogers, and Ross promises that the Winter Soldier is removed from all terror watch lists.  Homeland Security, Interpol – all of them. As far as the public knows the Winter Soldier dies in a drone strike abroad. Nothing left of him but his severed arm. Forensic results on residual remains conclude identity of mystery assassin, a militant out of Chechnya, not famed war hero Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes after all. Defamatory conspiracy theory debunked, irresponsible media shamed, etcetera, etcetera…I’ve helped fake assassinations before. It’s not hard.  Agree to come home, play nice, and negotiate and Barnes will be sitting in your living room when you walk in the door.”

She had watched Steve age decades under the dim orange haze of the light over the parking lot. 

“You found him?”

“Yes.”

He had sworn quietly, vehemently, squeezing the ice bucket in his grip until the metal sides had groaned and given way, crumpling like a wad of paper.  He had shaken like an animal backed into a corner, halfway between fight and flight.

Nat had gone in for the kill, “Did you really believe I, of all people, wouldn’t? None of the others know where he is. Not Tony, no one. They took it on faith that I hadn’t forged his signature. How about you?”

She had pulled out the folded piece of paper she'd carried with her across several continents and an ocean. The piece of paper that all their futures depended on. Steve had stepped further out into the light and inspected it.

“It's his” he had sighed, instantly deflating as he'd handed it back to her. 

He had sagged heavily against the cover of the ice machine, drawing a hand over his eyes, just breathing into the quiet darkness there for a few long minutes.

“Nobody touches Sam” he finally had gritted out, his voice choked with some wire-taunt, tremulous emotion Nat hadn't been able to bring herself to name. 

“Or Wanda or Clint or Scott. Promise me that and I’ll come with you.”  

He had looked up at her then and the desperation in his sad, tired, beloved face...well, Nat still felt a little dirty for that even now.  But, as she still reminded herself on occasion, better to have hurt him then than to have had to kill him later. 

Steve, Sam, and Natasha had walked into Steve’s apartment two days later, to find Bucky sitting on the couch, scribbling into a small notebook. In the loaded silence that had followed Nat pulled the fresh, unsigned medical proxy form out of her pocket and had placed it on the coffee table with a pen. She'd unfolded her copy of the former proxy agreement, torn it up, deposited the pieces into the kitchen trash and exited without a word, knowing she had no right to take part in the reunion to follow. 

That had been months ago. After the public announcement of the Winter Soldier’s death, the Avengers entered limbo, the grand international signing of the Accords having fallen away to private legal and governmental negotiations that were dragging on and on.  T’Challa’s testimony and Zemo’s confession had cleared Bucky of the Vienna bombing and the codebook (now safely locked away as evidence) and contents of Zemo’s hotel room, in addition to some of the files in the 2014 S.H.E.I.L.D leak, had protected Bucky from prosecution for the Winter Soldier’s crimes. However his exact legal status remained unclear. He had to be re-entered as a current American citizen, SSI # and all, a process that had largely been handled by S.H.I.E.L.D when Steve had been de-thawed.  He would likely need a new identity, since no one had figured out a good way to explain how Captain America’s right hand man had also miraculously come back from the dead without lending credence to the “Winter Soldier is James Barnes” conspiracy theory.  There had been little progress on that front; Bucky had only just gotten his name back and, potential rehabilitation set-backs aside, no one had had the heart to take it from him again.  

Then there was the complication of his seven decades of work as an enemy combatant and whether or not he had been in violation of numerous espionage acts.  It was unlikely he would be permitted to join the Avengers, should the Avengers get off the ground again and exactly what level of freedom he would have was currently being hashed out between Steve, Ross and legal counsel, leading to some very tense meetings and phone calls.

 Tony, largely out of regret over his role in the playground brawl that Ross and Co were referring to as the Civil War, had agreed to cover damages to the airport and any other monetary compensations that were required, and his legal team was assisting in filing a writ of habeas corpus over the detention on the Raft.  So far that argument had successfully cleared those who had been imprisoned on the Raft, returning them to their respective families and lives, but there was still potential for Steve to be prosecuted for the prison break.  However, actually bringing Steve to court for that would require public acknowledgment of the Raft’s existence and the dubious circumstances that lead to imprisonment there. So far that was the ace in Steve’s hand.  He had threatened to go public if necessary and since pretty much every major news outlet had been dying to get an interview with Captain America for years, this was no idle threat. As for the other end of the media spectrum, the web based Fact Channel had a higher millennial following than traditional print journalism and Nat knew Cindy Moon could use a big break. 

As it stood, Steve wasn’t quite on house arrest but he did have to send a daily itinerary to a federally appointed parole officer and he was not to leave New York City without pre-approved permission. Deliberations were largely at a stalemate. 

Tony had been absent through much of the last few months, sending lawyers in his place, irritating Steve to no end.  A few meetings had taken place at Stark Tower and in theory they could all still use facilities there and at the Avengers compound.  However, Sam had found them gym space through some contacts at the 23rd St. VA since Tony had also proclaimed that the Winter Soldier (he flatly refused to refer to Bucky by name) would only step foot on his property over his “dead body and the smoldering remains of an entire drone army.”  General morale was low. 

Here in the present Nat shifted uneasily, unsure whether to stay or leave Bucky the privacy of darkness to confront his ghosts.  She turned to go. 

“How long since you defected?” she turned to find him looking up at her, his eyes silvery in the moonlight. 

“2005. Was a gun for hire for about two years before I joined S.H.E.I.L.D. in 2007. Been on the straight and narrow, mostly, for 9 years.”

“These nights ever stop?”

It was the first real question he’d asked her, the first time they’d really been alone to talk in all the months since Wakanda and the subsequent return to New York. It’s not that they’d avoided each other deliberately, he’d warmed up to her once Steve, who hadn’t born his grudge against Nat long, started speaking to her again.  Steve wanted Bucky back and Bucky wanted to live so, manipulation or not, it was generally acknowledged that Nat had made the right call.

Still, Bucky had largely kept to himself, preferring to shadow Steve and fade into the woodwork after so many years as an assassin. He sparred with her, compared knife-fighting tactics, shot the shit about stuff on the news, watched Disney movies during Sam’s weekly movie nights, commented on music as he discovered it online. Sam nearly had heart failure when helping Steve make dinner one night and Pandora started playing _Sympathy for the Devil_.  Bucky had commented, “Oh hey, I heard this one the other day. Kinda like it.”

After some cautious questioning it became clear that Bucky didn’t actually get the Kennedy reference **.** The song didn’t offer any specifics about Dallas in ’63 either, so for the time being this incident took the cake for Darkly Hilarious Bucky-Recovery Irony.

He’d even flirted with her a little but only in Steve’s presence and in a strained way, as if trying to replicate the smooth-talker he’d been once, before the war. They’d talked but he hadn’t really said much and both had studiously avoided mentioning how familiar sparring was, even if their fighting styles had evolved over the years. 

“They become less frequent. I still have them occasionally.”

Less frequent would be an improvement. Steve’s apartment was a one bedroom and he was in the middle of a lease. Given that the status of his freedom was up in the air at present and New York rent being what it was, Steve had made the decision to sit tight. He had savings but what with legal fees and general uncertainty coupled with no viable present salary, it wasn’t wise to spend cash on moving just yet. He’d spent the first few weeks after Bucky's return sleeping on the couch but after a series of nights where Bucky awoke disoriented and confused, Steve had eventually migrated back to the bedroom. They’d shared bedrolls enough times during the War and Bucky’s nighttime episodes tended to resolve more quickly if Steve was right there when he awoke.

 Those nights took their toll. It was after coffee that morning when Steve, looking like death warmed over, hung up the phone on one of Tony’s lawyers (“I’m not talking any more until Tony can man up and call me directly instead of hiding behind a paid goon with a law degree!”), and stress-vomited into the dingy toilet at a corner bagel store, that Sam had put his foot down and stated in no uncertain terms that Steve would be spending the night at his place so he could get some goddamn sleep. Nat had volunteered to be on Bucky-watch and the guiltily grateful look in Steve’s eyes was enough to tell her that she should have done this sooner. 

“Then I might someday get the hang of sleeping again. I don’t know if it’s the chemicals I’ve been pumped with over the decades or a reaction to years in cryo but my body resisted sleep for ages after D.C. Pretty sure my neighbors at my first squat in Bucharest thought I was a –uh, tweaker? I think that’s the word - since I spent my nights pacing around my apartment, climbing onto the roof, running around the neighborhood. It took about a year and a half before I could sleep three nights in a row. Considered hitting the hard stuff except I don’t know how my body would process it. I think I vaguely recall using smack for a while, something about the idea of syringes brings a benign sense of peace but I don’t think it worked for very long.”

Nat had heard rumors that the Winter Soldier had gone AWOL in the 70s and was found in in a squat near Tompkins Square, six weeks later, the needle still in his arm.  He’d almost made it home but once he got close, couldn’t remember what he was looking for.

“Dreaming’s hard ‘cause I never really know what’s real and what’s not. I remember every damn kill I ever made but I don’t know how they string together.  I don’t know which horrors were created by drugs, by programming, or which ones I actually lived through.  It’s scary because I never know where the hell I’m going to wake up. Or who is going to be there – Steve climbed my tower and woke me once but the fairy tale went downhill after that-the train, the labs, an endless series of handlers, Karpov, Pierce, Rumlow.  It makes it hard to believe that it can ever be happily ever after when your white knight finds you again.” 

“It takes time. Took me a few years.  Then again, I was a spy. I had experience becoming new people. That helped in building a new life on my own.”

“Yeah, I was heavy artillery so I’m still trying to learn how to be a person again.”  He leaned against the headboard. “I’m probably not going to fall asleep for a while, you don’t have to stay.”

“Does it help if I do?”

“Kinda.” He fidgeted with his dog tags. Steve had them made for him, in the event that he had an episode and forgot who he was. No one was sure if that would happen, he hadn’t relapsed since Berlin.  Just to be safe though, Steve had tags made with Bucky’s name (unlike his service tags, his name read “James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes”) and Steve’s name and cell number. Bucky hadn’t taken them off yet.

 “You’re easier to talk to than that therapist I'm required to see. He’s a crusty old guy named Stanley who calls me ‘James’ and reminds me of Father Wheeler that one time he lectured us all when he found a condom in Harry Rafferty’s desk in the 10th grade.  Of course, this guy was probably in diapers when I was fighting a war in Europe so I have to fight the urge to call him ‘sonny boy’.

Speaking of condoms, this week Stanley arranged a visit from these sex educators so I could learn about ‘safer sex’”

Bucky made air quotes.

“There’s enough shit in my blood that they’re scared I’m going to knock some broad up and create a monster. No one has a clue what super serums do to babies. Everyone would really rather not find out the hard way so I got a condom demonstration from these educators who teach classes in Old People’s homes. They couldn’t figure whether they should treat me like a 30 something or a 90 something. I burst out laughing in the middle because – look, I liked a good time back in the day and didn’t want to get dragged to the altar too soon. I know my way around a rubber.  But, even better, Captain America and his Ma made sure I knew the importance of prophylactics.

There was this VD film Steve got roped into doing for the army. Something about Captain America shielding America from the enemy and how we had to do our part to shield ourselves from VD. It ended with soaring music and Cap urging us to “Shield up, boys! Shield up!”  It was the funniest damn thing. Once Steve and I met up again in Austria and I’d had a few days to connect Captain America with my best friend, I think I laughed for a solid day’s march.  He…eventually appreciated the humor.  He nearly hit me this one time I saw him go into a tent with Carter – honestly, I think it was a strategy meeting – and I yelled “Shield up, Captain America! Shield up!”  At least Carter seemed amused.”

Nat smirked. “Prior to Siberia, I think the closest Steve ever came to killing Tony was when Stark pulled that film from his father’s collection and screened it for us during an Avengers meeting. Tony implied that he was putting it on Youtube. Steve implied that he could, in fact, crush Tony like a roach.  It was an intense exchange for 3pm on a Tuesday.”

“I bet. Steve hated that film. I thought it was perfect for him, since he used to read these pamphlets his Ma had lying around. She worked a TB ward but she’d done some rounds as a visiting nurse. She gave both me and Steve the _Talk_ at her kitchen table when we were about 12. My Ma was too uncomfortable and she didn’t trust my father to actually do it before it was too late so she asked Sarah. I used a rubber when I was 17, the first time a girl let me go all the way, partially because I didn’t want to disappoint her.”

His face softened a little.  “I didn’t need the war to teach me that life is brutally unfair. Sarah’s death – geez. She couldn’t catch a break. Trying to raise a sickly kid on her own, dealing with patients’ crap-literal and figurative-every day. She was real young when she had Steve and a lot of people who met her for the first time assumed his father had never been in the picture. I wandered into the house one day when we were all supposed to be out playing and walked in on Sarah and my Ma drinking at the kitchen table. Sarah was crying. Not pretty lady crying, bitter, fierce on the edge of drunk crying. She said something like ‘for every time you’re a war widow, you’re three times damaged goods’.  She wasn’t ashamed, she was frustrated and spitting mad. Like she wanted to tear the world apart. Saw that look on Steve’s face so many times over the years. Saw it in Siberia.

Soldier fathers who die in battle are always heroes to their kids. Maybe his dad actually was. Who knows? But the piss and vinegar street brawler in Steve? That’s all Sarah. I used to think she would have liked Carter. Carter’s edges were smoother, little more polished. But she and Sarah Rogers were made of similar stuff.”

He shook his head. “Anyway, Steve was briefly cool for a while in our teens because he knew stuff. Was considered less cool when he animatedly talked about the political importance of making that information more available. May have gotten detention for telling Father Wheeler that the Church needed to stop bullying people for their personal decisions.  There was an organization he used to mention, can’t remember what they were called, changed their name during the war years. Something Parenthood Federation…”

“Planned Parenthood Federation of America. They’re still around. Steve has sent them some anonymous checks in the past.”

“Good to know. He told me he had to sit through How Not to be a Diseased Old Man class too, after they pulled him out of the ice. Erskine’s work was clean enough that Steve would probably end up fathering little blonde super soldier ankle biters, but they weren’t willing to take chances with him either.”

Nat remembered this discussion floating around S.H.E.I.L.D when Steve had been found. Heritable gene mutations were less understood in Erksine’s time and wouldn’t it be cruelly ironic if Captain America, the pinnacle of G.I. Joe virility, harbored something potentially deficient or lethal to future offspring. Or, worse, if he was sterile. The effects of Vita-Ray radiation on sperm production wouldn't have been any better understood or anticipated. It was possible the original Project Rebirth team had intentionally engineered it that way. A proprietary fail-safe meant to limit and control the spread of their patented technology. Captain America had been a prototype after all, and a reproducing prototype could jeopardize the study.  In her more cynical moments, Nat was comforted by the knowledge that all the nations that had experimented in turning humans into weapons had altered them to be a non-replicating single issue.

 “I’m jealous, Barnes. I didn’t get any show and tell in my S.H.E.I.L.D mandated therapy sessions. My therapist, Louise, mostly tried to get me to talk about the _inconsistencies_ in my history _._ The memories that don’t add up on deep reflection.“

“Really?  How bad did they mess with your head in the Widow program?  The tech was probably less of a hack job by the time you came along…I think I got some upgrades in the 80s – it was a busy decade between dictatorships in South America, Iran, the fall of the Iron Curtain. I was in and out of the box a lot. “

He furrowed his brow. “You were born in the 80s right? Still getting used to the fact twenty and thirty somethings are usually born in the 80s and early 90s rather than the teens and early twenties.” 

There was a note of hesitation in his voice that seemed to go beyond re-framing his concept of time.  He knew, she thought. Even if he didn’t fully remember or understand, he knew.

She knelt on the bed and crawled toward the headboard.  “To be honest, Bucky, I don’t know how old I am.  Current documentation, including that creepy Zola consciousness Steve and I found at Fort Leigh states that I was born in 1984, which is what I remember.  I remember growing up in the Red Room, training, leaning languages and codes.  I remember my missions, even the ones I’d really like to forget.  It’s all there in my head.

But I also remember dancing at the Bolshoi, to great acclaim. That never happened. We learned dance, it helped with discipline and conditioning and was a useful cover for athletic young women, looking to ingratiate themselves to powerful men. But I never performed professionally. When I really stop and think about it, those ballerina memories may have been programmed into me when they were transfusing me with their own version of the super soldier serum – that happened sometimes without a visit to the chair. Children don’t typically ask what’s in the IV bag dripping into their arm, even less so when they grow up in the Red Room where unquestioning obedience is one of the first things they learn.  We all had healing factors, that didn’t take long to figure out.”

She leaned against the headboard. “The Soviet serum was more toxic in large doses than Erksine’s product aka the American Method. I think early trials were universally lethal before it was determined that a host could adapt to smaller dosages stretched over a period of years.  Hence the Black Widow program molding its agents from childhood.

Still, they never gave up trying for an ideal serum that could create a super soldier overnight.  Giving the serum over time did dilute its effectiveness and calculating the dosage size for a child’s growing body mass and metabolism was a headache they wanted to eliminate.  I vaguely recall when I was around 5 an older girl having a persistent bloody nose for a few hours. She developed a fever that night and started seizing. They took her away and we never saw her again. She was in her early teens and they might have tried to top off her serum levels before moving her up the ranks.

They toed the line with you, since Zola’s work made you a hardier specimen than most. Files recovered indicate they nearly killed you a couple of times in the later 40s when they were creating the Winter Soldier.  Try as they might, they never could quite replicate the American Method.  Steve remains unique.”  

“Yeah, he got the premium.” Bucky interjected, “I got weeks of moonshine, strapped to a table in some shit-hole in Austria. Think I was full-on hallucinating for most of it so I might have been a fucking ballerina for all I know. Tutu and everything. Started noticing during my time with Steve and the Howlies that I didn’t get cold or tired or hungry as easily. Or drunk. That got expensive. Then I fell out of a freight car and the rest is basically a fever dream punctuated with agony.”

He fumbled through the nightstand drawer and pulled out a box of cigarettes. He turned it over and over in his hands.

“Steve got ‘em for me.” He said when he noticed her looking, holding up the pack. “Apparently Luckies are hard to find nowadays. Seventy years without kinda killed the habit and Steve says it’s bad for your health now.”

“Expensive too.”

He rolled his eyes, “Nat, my last paycheck was cashed in 1944. Or maybe ’45. Tell you the truth, that winter kinda runs together for me. Considering what I could buy with it then, everything is expensive now.” He pulled out a cigarette and balanced it between his knuckles. “I hold them. Feels familiar and gives me something to do with my hands.”

He gestured for her to continue.

“I lose my timeline sometimes. I have flashes of memories that don’t add up. I don’t know if they're bits of a past that was scrubbed away and jumbled up in the process or fictions created deliberately to destabilize me.  Ballerina fantasies helped to keep us loyal little daughters of the Motherland but not all these fragments are happy, not things you would give me if you wanted me content and unquestioning.

My first assignment was at a boarding school.  My target was the daughter of a man with more ambition and pride then self-preservation and who'd refused to abide by his political handlers one too many times. His daughter was his Achilles heel. She was 12. So was I.  I spiked Evgeniya Drakova’s inhaler with a toxin that would make her death appear like a fatal asthma attack.  She was a sweet girl, had a cool older cousin who was studying abroad and used to send her music magazines. Once during study hall, we were leafing through one and I saw an article about a singer who had just died. Some days I remember it being Marc Bolan, other days Tupac Shakur. These weren’t retrospective pieces either, they were talking about someone who had just died. Those men died 20 years apart.“

She wondered, idly what time it was.  Steve had yet to replace the alarm clock Bucky had destroyed in his sleep a week earlier so she felt as if she was suspended in time, outside night and day.  In the lucid drowsy state she was in, it fit. Normally this state would raise red flags for her to retreat inside a mask, to guard her tongue. She knew it was dangerous to be betwixt and between, unmoored between sleeping and waking, out of time. But wasn’t that how she always lived? 

The dark made it easier to talk. During the year and a half that S.H.E.I.L.D had required her to see Louise she hadn’t expressed anything beyond what was strictly necessary, just as Stanley reported exasperation with Bucky’s minimal, grudging compliance.  Clint and Steve had been easier to open up to, Clint for his sheer unflappable normalcy muddled with general life incompetence (Natasha marveled at how that man had managed to get Laura to agree to marry him, much less entrust him with the care of their offspring) and Steve for his warmth and similar feelings of displacement and lack of home. 

Still, she’d never had the opportunity to talk like this with someone who knew intimately what it was like to simultaneously know your past with razor edge precision and to exist in a fog of untethered uncertainty.

 She stretched out on her back.  “How old was I when we were together?”

Not even Clint knew this part of her past. 

“I don’t know. You didn’t strike me as jailbait though.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was already a literal widow by then. An extremely young widow, I had practically been a child bride to Shostakov. But I wasn’t a child.”

She smiled wistfully. “Alexei Shostakov. My earnest little test pilot who flew too close to the sun. Had he kept in line he might have been a cosmonaut one day. I was assigned to keep tabs on his activities. It was suspected that he was poking around in places he shouldn’t. He was considered a defection risk as well. My handlers hoped that having me to come home to would tie him down. I think he actually loved me. Talked about the future. He was confused and concerned when after nearly a year of marriage I still hadn’t conceived.  Poor boy.

I was sterilized a few years prior to the wedding – I confirmed that operation with S.H.E.I.L.D when they ran tests after I was brought in. I was messing around with Murdock at the time and wanted to know if I needed to bother with birth control. The marriage was a mission, after all, and no Widow gets sent on a mission like that if she hasn’t been through the _Ritual_.

The Ritual was a rite of passage. By my reckoning, I was thirteen. I’d been bleeding less than a year.  In the Red Room you didn’t become a woman at your first period. They made you a woman when they took away what your period signified.

She chewed her lip, remembering.

“Nadya, an older girl in the program, crawled into my bed in the infirmary one night when I was recovering. I woke up as she placed headphones over my ears and tucked a cd player into my hands under the sheets.  She stayed there with me for the entire run of a contraband _Spice Girls_ album, her arms around me, her face nestled in the back of my neck. When it finished, she took the headphones and the CD player and slipped away into the darkness.  That was a close to friendship as you ever got in the Red Room. Silent, unspoken solidarity. Commiseration if you want to wax romantic. Whenever I hear _2 Become 1_ I still remember how badly I needed to be touched kindly that night. Nadya understood."

Natasha swallowed poorly around the ghostly pang of old hurts and sighed, “Anyway, the first part that doesn’t add up is that I may have once come across a mention of Shostakov’s plane crash buried in a footnote to a mission briefing. Again, I only saw it for a second but I could have sworn it said Alexei was killed in 1963.  I know the Spice Girls are a classic now but they aren’t that classic.”

“Who the hell are the Spice Girls?” 

“Look them up. Play their music loudly. Sam will mock you mercilessly but I’d bet anything he knows all the words to _Wannabe_.  Probably had pictures of them hidden in his room in middle school.”

“I’ll add them to the list.”

“The other thing,” she continued after a moment of silence, “the really surreal part is that I also have this vivid sense memory of being pregnant and going into premature labor after a skirmish. Of being alone, the sole survivor of my unit on the Eastern Front, and collapsing out of pain and grief in a snow laden forest.   I can’t remember how old I was and none of the files I’ve ever been able to locate reference this at all. But I couldn't have been pregnant, not if I was sterilized at thirteen.

I always wondered if this was a scenario put into my head to make me appreciate the _Ritual_.  Bleeding into the freezing night on your own while it feels like something is trying to claw its way out of you is not an experience I recommend. Maybe they were trying to prevent me from resenting a decision that was made for me while I was still a child myself. It’s effective.”

She glanced at him for a moment. Making up her mind, she flicked her eyes up to the ceiling and continued. 

“I vividly recall our time together largely because it was the first time I rebelled against the Red Room in more than thought.  Product isn’t supposed to fuck other product.  I thought of that our first time. You had me up against a locker door, the grating digging into my back –“

“- Sweet Jesus, Natalia, we’re in Steve’s bed right now-”

“I wouldn’t say it if I thought he could hear. Believe it or not, I haven’t exactly found the perfect moment to casually mention “Oh hey, this one time, at assassin camp…I fucked your ex-boyfriend.” Up until now I wasn’t even sure how much of it you remembered. You’re his once and future, Bucky. Didn’t see much point in reminding you of the days I called you Sasha.”

She heard a smile in his voice as he added, “Even when I didn’t remember you, I sometimes heard that name and felt your fingers in my hair, pulling me up between your legs. Think I even heard it in Odessa although I swear I didn’t know who you were anymore. Why Sasha? I never asked.”

“I don’t know. I liked the name. Never had a doll or a stuffed bear or a puppy and technically everything I had belonged to the State. I belonged to the State. Felt good to name something, possess someone.  I met you during one of your longer stretches out of cryo, when you had time for a personality to develop. I’d whisper that diminutive and the Winter Soldier would melt away a little, revealing a bad boy and a charmer.  Can’t say it wasn’t an ego boost to know I could make their precious Asset writhe in my arms.”

“Glad to know my reputation precedes me…”

“That sex stayed with me, bruises and all.  It was a destructive freefall and the first time I didn’t have ulterior motives when getting naked with someone.  It was exhilarating.”

“I always had a thing for redheads.” He picked at the hem of the sheets. “Sex blurs together for me. One minute I’ve got my hand up Mary Teresa Maginello’s skirt at the back of the movie theater as she moans in my ear, smelling like Wrigley’s and Pepsodent, next I’m rolling around with you in the back of a battered cargo truck, your teeth sinking into my shoulder."

Nat sat and drew up her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “My experiences were…mixed,” she said. “You learned to break it down into a series of motions. There was training…it was clinical. You were coached and critiqued in how to keep your body loose, your emotions in check, but your mind grounded in the mission, always keeping the situation within your control.  Pain was either to be suppressed or acted upon, but never shown.  There wasn’t really a first time, after enough of these sessions, you didn’t really attach desire or passion or sentimentality to the act, not when it happened in a stark white room with a two way mirror.”

“Nat, how old were you? Roughly?”

“You really don’t want to know the answer to that question, Barnes.”

“Shit.”

“It wasn’t that different from anything else in the Red Room. Our primary training was infiltration, exfiltration, espionage – shadow work. But sex was part of the job when it had to be. They didn’t care much, during debriefs, how that part of the assignment went.  It was work and you did whatever was necessary.  At best, it was forgettable. At worst, so long as your target read the detachment in your eyes as blissful languor than all was fine. On the rare occasion, it was pleasant.”

She glanced over to find him watching her.

“Did I hurt you?”

She smiled wryly, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. “You asked that when we were in the cargo truck near Vladivostok. It…was an intense night. Mission went sideways and we had to camp out until morning. We had started a fire to cover our tracks…in a hospital…it was pretty sick. You hadn’t been reprogrammed or sent back into cryo in about 6 months.  Looking back, I think Bucky Barnes was resurfacing and you were angry as hell.  I was too, thrashing in the web I still couldn’t bring myself to break free from and I felt guilty as shit because of it.  You wanted to defect that night but we didn’t.  Ripping our clothes off and tearing into each other was easier.

This was the period I came closest to having a death wish.  I might have doused a quarantine unit in accelerant a few hours earlier but I had been playing with fire for months. Risking discovery with you hours before being activated on critical missions, hardly bothering with stealth as I returned to the dormitory at dawn, reeking of sex?  Still an improvement over a few of the close calls I had when I took arrogant risks during operations, risks I knew better than to attempt. I let the remaining Widows think it was bravado – I was the favorite and I’m pretty sure the others all hated me anyway.  But deep inside, I was full of feral rage. That night I threw caution to the winds and used your body like a battlefield, consequences be damned. You rose to the occasion.”

Bucky bent his head, running his hands over his face and through his hair. “It was always rough-that, that was how we did it… but that night was the only time I ever heard you cry out in pain. You” he shifted, agitated, “you recoiled beneath me as I…uh…as I pulled out and I watched you clean blood off your thighs the next morning. I…it just…shit, Nat, I am so fucking sorry.  I took what I wanted and didn’t care what happened to you until it was over.”

He took a deep, unsteady breath. “What I’m most ashamed of is how good it felt to have no limits. I hated being used so I used you. I can’t blame that on the Winter Soldier.”

“No, you can’t. But your reaction to it after let me in on what kind of man you might have been once. You were horrified. Contrite. Should have pegged you for a Catholic boy right then. There was something decent inside, wrapped up in pain, anger, and frustration. Within a week, they took you away and I didn’t see you again until Odessa.”

He started to reach his hand toward hers but stopped, as if afraid to touch her.  She met him halfway and folded his right hand in her left. 

 “Steve started to thaw out my mind from that moment he called my name on the bridge. But you next to him tugged at my threads too, helped short out my programming enough to open my mind up.  You alone in Odessa hadn’t done that, but you with him – that helped.  Combined sense of significant things I’d forgotten, I guess.  Think you may have started to unravel me a little back in the day which is why they sent me away.  It’s so jarring, suddenly realizing there might be major blocks of your life just completely gone from your head.  Makes you want to know why they’re gone, what was important enough about them to get them removed.”

 “I had that feeling out in the Rhapastani desert a couple of years ago when I met Yelena Belova”, Natasha added. “In theory she’s younger than I am and we’d never met prior.  Yet I have this weird half memory of getting her off when we were in our teens in that same locker room you and I defiled.  Why create a memory of my replacement as premier Black Widow spread out beneath me on the floor behind the weight rack? I mean, she hates my guts about as much as she probably does want my tongue finding her sweet spot so I don’t find this scenario entirely improbable. But was it to divert my recall away from my rebellion with you? Or were you not actually the first time I looked for a thrill within the Red Room?”

She let his hand go and turned over to stretch out on her stomach, propped up in her elbows.

“So, what the hell is my mind? I can’t tell if my memories were was sloppily edited like a half erased chalkboard or artfully crafted to prevent me from ever being fully confident enough in the recall of my own life to question them.

The Winter Soldier was a one of a kind experiment, with ties to Hydra first and then the Red Room.  There is a clearer paper trail on you because you were unique, at least until ‘91. They had to break Bucky Barnes and remake the Winter Soldier in their own image.  They kept notes.  Me?  I may still carry the Black Widow title, I may have been the best, but I wasn’t the only one. They created me. Inconsistent as my memory is I have nothing before the Red Room. For all I know, they named me Natalia Alianovna Romanova the same way I named you Sasha.

There was never a codebook with phrases to drag me back, I was a Widow because I was raised to believe it was an honor. I had intent, if not total agency over my life and I ultimately defected as a personal choice, when a lifetime, or maybe a few lifetimes, of being used frustrated me for the last time. 

 As far as S.H.E.I.L.D is concerned, I was 23 when Clint brought me in. It may well be true. But I’m not sure for how long I'd been 23.

 Maybe my memories were readjusted to make me believe I wasn’t arrested in time, updating the set dressing to make my past recollections seem less antiquated. Or maybe none of it happened and I really was born in the 80s. Selective neural reprogramming is a hell of a lot harder than a complete wipe but more useful – even you weren’t completely _tabula rasa_ each time you came out of cryo otherwise they’d have to retrain years of combat and tactical conditioning.  Although my mental editing was finer that yours I know what it’s like to have your head fucked with, to not be able to trust your own memories and wonder what else it is you don’t remember.

 It’s one of the reasons why it took so much restraint on my part to not destroy Loki slowly and painfully when he invaded Clint’s mind. It’s why, much as I’ve come to trust her since Sokovia, there are days where I want to beat the shit out of Wanda for that time on the freighter. I’d spent years trying to let go of the inconsistencies, the terrifying void of a compromised memory. I’d built my new life on the assumption that life, like truth, is a matter of circumstance and I had chosen to live from 1984 onward. Then this little witchy-punk _Craft_ wannabe brat drags it all back.”

She wadded the pillow up, squeezing it as she breathed in and out, in and out.

“I said earlier that these nights never really go away? That they have a way of coming back occasionally? Yeah, about a year or so ago I had one. It was a couple of months after Sokovia. I’d been doing ok since Wanda stuck her fingers into my brain but I wasn’t great. Clint’s kids were watching this movie, _Anastasia_ -“

She noted the blank look on his face.

“It’s a kid’s cartoon speculating that the Grand Duchess Anastasia might have survived. It chalks up the entire Revolution to this evil wizard and his talking bat.” She rolled her eyes. “Anyway I remember sitting in Clint’s kitchen, chatting with him and Laura, when the song _Once Upon a December_ came on. It’s where Anya wanders through a palace as ghosts of her past begin to open doors in her amnesiac brain.  The next thing I know I’m on my knees in Clint’s barn, my hands are full of glass shards, and I’m hyperventilating so badly Clint is dialing 911.  He hung up when my eyes came back into focus and he could tell I knew where I was. I didn’t go back in the house until after the kids were asleep and Laura had taped trash bags over the remains of the sliding doors. Clint spent the night curled up in his guest bed, holding me, as my brain flashed through re-combinations of my past like a ViewMaster’s fever dream.”

Old wounds, re-opened and recollected. And throughout that whole night she’d felt movement within her, a persistent swimming in her abdomen, a kick here and there.  It had been terrifying and more than a little devastating.

“I raged for hours in who knows how many languages. I hated Wanda. Wanted to blame it all on her even though she was just messing with the material that was that was already there. The next day we went out back to Clint’s range, shot some arrows and acknowledged that this would be the one place I was allowed to hate her. Because she was an angry kid without a home who had been manipulated into being a weapon, who had been kept in the dark about what she was really being used for.  Who watched her entire family die in someone else’s fight.  I can relate. I want to be friendlier to her, really, I do, but so far, we’ve been co-workers, courteous and nothing more.  I think she’s afraid of me, just hides it behind eye rolling and eyeliner.  She’s opened up in fits and starts to Clint, Steve and Vision but mostly she’s just been quietly sitting on a mountain of guilt that she doesn’t know how to express. Been there.”

“Yeah. Know the feeling.  She’s taken Steve up on his open invitation to crash here a few times.  Sometimes she even rings the doorbell first. Other times she lets herself in – apparently those powers work on locks? Terrifying. I got up to piss in the middle of the night once and found the kid sound asleep on the couch. She’s usually gone by morning.” 

Nat sighed, “You’re not the only who views Steve as safety, Barnes.  This is a house for misfit toys. She would stay with Clint if she knew his address but we’ve kept that from her for now. I don’t think she’s stable enough to be around his kids. Auntie Nat’s breakdown was bad enough..

Everyone's hoping Wanda shows up for the next meeting with the lawyers. She skipped the last one and we’re having a hard enough time convincing the world she isn’t a loose cannon.  She was given a longer leash than you and Steve after the truce but she’s pushing it. More often than not she’s in the wind since she’s spending less and less time at the Avengers compound.  Not that I blame her, she never really warmed up to Stark and doesn’t trust him an iota after the whole mess in Berlin landed her in a straitjacket and shock collar on the Raft.  She’s on and off with Vision, off lately, mostly due to his continued loyalty to Stark. I think she’s running around with some of those underground goth-vampire types at present.” 

“How does the phrase go again? Oh right, 'kids these days'", said Bucky. “Steve was trying to get her to answer her phone the other night, he ended up leaving her a voicemail message, ‘It’s been a week, Wanda...you’re starting to scare me. Could you please let me know that you’re ok?’ Christ, he is starting to become my mother...or even scarier his mother. It’s surreal considering what a reckless little shit he was at her age, especially after his Ma died. Takes one to know one I guess.  I think he sees something familiar in that chip on her shoulder.”

 “She’s now got older people riding herd on her for the first time in a while and she’s lashing out. She resents it, especially since, on appearances, Steve and I aren’t that much older than she is. Though I suspect for Steve the military has a way of making you feel responsible and protective of those barely younger than yourself.  She was the one who needed the most convincing in Nebraska.  Steve spoke with her privately for a solid hour to get her to come back East.  She was torn. On the one hand, wanting to just run free on her own, and on the other, terrified of being alone.”

“She had a brother, right?”

“Yeah, a twin.  Pietro. They were close. He died protecting Clint, fighting Ultron. One more strike against Tony when push came to shove in the end. She doesn’t have much experience being by herself. She’s trying to grow up and figure out what she wants.  Which is more than some members of our team…or all of our team. Can’t say I blame Pepper for leaving. Somedays you get pretty damn tired of playing mommy to a bunch of adults. You can all be such children sometimes.”

“Hey, you never had to haul Rogers out of a bar fight.” Bucky groused. “Consider yourself lucky. You got role model Steve. You know, the kind who signs autographs for kids and tells them to eat their veggies and make their beds.  Y’know, he still gets letters from kids he met on the road?  This old lady named Molly McIntire sent him a photo from a war bond rally he spoke at somewhere in Illinois. He’s standing there in that stupid costume with her and her two little friends. A Susan and a Linda according to the handwritten note on the back. The kids are glowing.  Like, to them he was already a hero, saving the world, before he ever made it into combat. He actually grew up to be Buck Rogers.”

Bucky half-smiled. “We used to call ourselves that as kids.”  He slid the cigarette behind his ear. “Us against the neighborhood. Together we were unstoppable.  When we all returned to camp after Azzano and everyone was cheering, I wanted to be proud of him. I was proud.” He scratched at the back of his head “But deep inside I couldn’t believe he had gone and become Buck Rogers without me.  He didn’t need me to rescue him anymore. Other way around. He had a whole new life that I had missed after I shipped out. New body, new people. Seems to be a repeating pattern in my life.”  

“I never played pretend as a child.” Nat mused. “We lived pretend, always learning to morph into new people.  Not sure we knew what normal children imagined.  I guess we might have imagined parents? Families?  I have no idea how we were all acquired.  Maybe we were run-of-the-mill orphans, maybe our parents were political dissidents in a gulag somewhere.  I tracked some leads about where I came from a few years ago but ultimately decided I had nothing to go back to so why bother?

I have no past to call me home. That’s why we returned to roost in the Red Room. We didn’t need leashes, although every now and then we would be handcuffed to our bedframes. It was randomized, harder to plan an escape around it. But any of us worth our salt could have picked those locks by the time we were seven. It was symbolic, to remind us that we weren’t ever in control. They changed the type of cuffs too every now and then. Sometimes we would have a fire drill in the night, klaxons jolting us from sleep. Then they’d find out who been paying attention in class a year and a half earlier when we had been introduced to that model.  Free yourself, get your boots on while evacuating, hope it wasn’t snowing this time.  The stragglers would get a day in solitary.  It was essential that you always be ready-“

“-to comply” Bucky finished with her. 

Silence fell as they both processed the effect those words still had.  The phrase used to make her feel calm and focused. Time and translation had mitigated the effect but there was still calm. Only now that calm made her queasy. 

She shook her head “I’m still alive because they trusted I was compliant enough to not reveal all the secrets I knew, even after I defected. They weren’t wrong. I gave S.H.E.I.L.D plenty. But not everything.”

She rested the side of her head on her arms folded over the pillow, her face turned toward him.

“That’s why I was never made to forget you – my handlers trusted that I was still dedicated enough to move past a few sordid months of stolen moments in the locker room, the showers, the border crossing checkpoint booth in Kashmir-“

Bucky barked out a laugh. “That happened!?!? God, I really thought that one had to be a dream! It was even better than that one where I did it with Ginger Rogers – I told you, redheads!” He scooted to lie on his back next to her, retrieving his cigarette.  “Course, now that I think about it, that dream ended with me sucking off Clark Gable so I think there were some things I hadn’t quite admitted to myself back then.” He glanced over to her.  “I wasn’t shocked about Steve and Sam. It’s not like that stuff didn’t happen back then, especially in the Army. You just never fucking talked about it.” He rolled the cigarette between his fingers. “No, not shocked,” he began slowly, “Maybe a little jealous that Sam beat me to it.” 

He paused and then sighed. “Don’t tell Steve.” 

“I think he knows.”

“Yeah, that almost makes it worse. There’s a lot of stuff we never talked about back then. My feelings about him were….complicated. Still are. I’m glad he stays here with me most nights but it’s rough sharing a bed with him, knowing there’s things I…might like to do with him…it hurts a little but I’m starting to think it always did. Some nights when I wake up quietly I just lie in the dark and listen to him breathe, feel that longing gnawing away inside me and I can’t always tell which bed, which apartment, which decade we’re in. My body’s danced this number before, even if I can’t recall where it lead. He looks at me in quiet moments like he wants to talk about something but he stops himself every time. I don’t want to bring it up. He’s got a good thing going with Sam and I don’t want to get in the middle of that.

He placed the unlit cigarette to his lips and thought for a moment.

“The trouble is sometimes I'm certain Steve and I _did_ have a thing for a while when we lived together, even if we never named it” he began quietly “Other times I'm dead certain I tried kissing him once late one night when I was three sheets to the wind and he pushed me away. He may or may not have spat “fairy!” at me.  Not in a joking way, nasty, like I was garbage.

Pretty sure now that didn’t happen, definitely sure it didn't happen with Steve. Probably something put in my head when the Soviets were trying to break me. But my brain’s so rusted over it’s hard to tell the difference. Some of the fake stuff feels more real than things that Steve tells me happened when we were kids. Got two years of notebooks full of disconnected memories that I’ve been trying to sort out. Finally got ‘em back after Ross and his boys poured through them in Berlin. I resent that, you know? That shit was private. There was some really fucked up stuff I was working through, so I just wrote whatever came to me, stream of consciousness shit, you know? You read ‘em?”

“Some scans, yeah.”

“Figured. Stanley won’t say he’s read them but it’s pretty clear from his questions that he has. No, I do not want to ‘talk about the erotic tone’ of some of my more graphic – memories- whatever the hell they are, of Steve. I don’t care if **'** It’s a different world today, James. Exploring the many dimensions of your feelings for Steve will not make you any less of a man **'**. No thanks, pal, I came from a time and place where admitting to a shrink, who you only saw if you got a night in Bellevue, that you just might have a hard-on for your best friend was a one-way ticket to whole new world of awful. And that’s not something anyone who reminds me of Father fucking Wheeler needs to know about.  I haven’t had the privacy of my own skull for seventy years. I really wish they’d all let my mind be mine.

He smiled slightly. “It pisses Steve off.  He’s never liked doctors trying to tell you about how your body is supposed to work. I mean, if I hadn’t been assigned a therapist and could have chosen to meet with one of Sam’s contacts, well, then it would be different.  I think we all know that my sessions with Stanley aren’t strictly confidential. That whole ‘duty to break doctor-patient confidentiality if the patient is going to hurt someone’ basically went into effect from the start due to that whole Winter Soldier thing. It’s really amazing how deep my lack of enthusiasm for those sessions runs knowing that everything I say has the potential to be typed up and handed to top brass in a manilla folder.  

No way am I telling Steve that, though.  He tried to fight the mandated therapist requirement but I stopped him.  I want to make this work and he needs to stop fighting every battle for me.  He sat outside in the waiting room for my first few sessions, glaring at the door. We don’t talk about my sessions. Life goes on.  I asked him once if he had read my notes and he cocked an eyebrow and said 'Becca’s diary.'

 I stole my little sister’s diary this one time, because I thought it would be hilarious to see who she had a crush on and what the heck she thought about all the time. I read a page out loud to Steve before he grabbed it away from me.

When you grow up living half on top of each other in tiny apartments, you value whatever privacy you can get, even if it’s only in your own head. He was 13 but oh the Captain America sense of justice practically beamed right out of him. Told me what he thought of me in words that should’ve gotten his mouth washed out with soap.”

Bucky drifted in thought for a moment. “I wonder if his Ma ever did that. Mine definitely washed out my mouth _in front of_ Steve when I was 9 for repeating a word _he_ taught me. Not that my Ma would believe me. She liked Steve. Thought he was a good influence which goes to show just how distracting those big blue eyes of his can be. If only she knew….sneaky little bastard. God, what was the word….”

He grinned as it came to him “Oh, right, that was it. Christ almighty...” He giggled.

“Care to share?”

“Nope, no I certainly do not.” He propped his head up with his left arm. “Anyway he wouldn’t let me have the notebook back until we made it back to my apartment and he watched me put it back where I found it. That story came back to me late one night about a year ago when I couldn’t sleep and was scribbling notes. I remembered a small notebook being pulled out of my hands. Then the details started to fill in. The longer I spent after D.C., reading up on him, being in the world, the clearer it started making the pre-Fall stuff.”

He snorted. “Pre-Fall. Sounds almost Biblical. In that case Steve is my pillar of fire in the night, leading me home through the desert.”

“Not sure I’d consider down by the Navy Yards back in your youth to be the Promised Land…”

“Sweetheart,” Bucky drawled, “that’s ‘cause you never left it to cross an ocean and slog through the mud and get covered in the spray of some farm kid’s arterial blood as he gets taken out in front of you. Poor little Dorothy never gets to go back to his Kansas so you’re damned if you’re not going to find a way back to yours. Take whatever homecoming you can get.” 

He rang his hand over his face. “Fuck, I wasn’t trying to rub that in.  You went through your own hell, Nat.”

“It was different. I didn’t know I was in hell for a long time. The Red Room molds you into an animal and cages you until it suits them to let you free.  Sharpens your fangs and creates high octane emotions kept in check by a clinical detachment. Spies and assassins aren’t passionate, you always have to channel your feelings to serve their interests.

When we were children, fighting and petty disagreement were discouraged.  If you were caught fighting, over any trivial thing, verbally or otherwise, you would both be marched to the training ring and set to fight for real.  You would have to pause for form to be critiqued, to be given guidance on how to more effectively land the kick you had leveled at your classmate’s head.  Disorderly, childish squabbles were kept to a minimum with this system, but they knew it made us less likely to pull our punches, when we quietly cataloged every slight done to us and let the anger build.  You weren’t supposed to yell when someone’s hair was all over the shower, you were supposed to start calmly planning which way you would incapacitate her next time you were set against her.

 In theory, you were supposed to use the most efficient method that wouldn’t result in serious injury – we had a particular violent few weeks where almost two thirds of the girls ended up in the infirmary which lead to a halt on sparring until we all recovered. Given our healing factors that wasn’t long but they didn’t want to risk losing too much product in one go. Not yet.  The culling of the herd started later.

I spent over 15 minutes in the ring with Svetlana when we were 6 and we had gotten into an argument over something stupid. I limped away with a black eye and three broken fingers.  The pathetic part is that moment wasn’t even on my mind when I snapped her neck in a routine training exercise in that same ring when we were 13.  By then, I had already watched the light go out of Evgeniya’s eyes as she'd struggled to breathe. That had been in a warmer, happier, P.E. class, surrounded by terrified girls who didn’t already know how to field strip a Kalashnikov or decode wireless transmissions in 6 languages.  Girls who could actually be friends without expecting that they might one day have to kill each other when the coach nodded.  Cooperation was essential, but if you were told to destroy your partner, you didn't think twice about it. Hell was realizing how fucked up this was and still not doing anything about it.”

 “How come you’re still in the business, Nat?” Bucky cautiously asked. “I mean, you got out but you still do…basically the same job you did back then.”

“What else would I do, Barnes? Teach martial arts to underprivileged children? Because I have lovely associations with children in training rings. I can’t even stomach the cute little gymnasts in the Olympics because I could do most of what they can at a younger age while carrying concealed weapons.  I have a very specific skillset and I’m damn good at it. The two years I spent as a freelancer gave me a reason to constantly be on the run, evading my handlers. I knew they were looking for me, either to drag me back or have me eliminated. Had a couple close calls but, well, I am the Black Widow. Like I said, I’m damn good at what I do. I suspect they'd already shredded most of my files by that point and they were always careful not to digitize anything too sensitive. If I wasn't theirs, then I didn’t and never did exist as far as they were concerned. An interchangeable part in the machine. Though, I don’t think they ever quite managed to replace me, much as Yelena would love to believe otherwise. She's still very much alive by the way. The Red Room too as far as I know, although, I suspect they've rebranded to something that sounds more legitimate, less lurid.

 I’ve no idea if they’re still training new Widows or if they’re just using however many operatives are left under a new name. I tried to get Yelena out a few years ago but…well that’s a decision only she can make.  She’s talented and they give her plenty of scope for her abilities.”

“What if they are still training little girls? You ever think about trying to help any of them get out?“ Bucky said, a razor fine edge to his voice.   

“I’m not a hero, Bucky”, Nat bit out, bristling at the implicit accusation. “I may not be a tool any more but I’m still not that kind of hero. For a while I let myself believe I could be. That I could wear an eagle on my sleeve and work toward blotting out the red in my ledger.

S.H.E.I.L.D was an opportunity to use my talents for something I was convinced was better; it gave me a purpose, an anchor to hold on to, especially in the turbulence of those early days when I was in from the cold and completely at loose ends. A purpose with a paycheck, health plan, 401(k), and vacation days.  International espionage with full-benefits and a retirement plan that didn't include a bullet to the head and a shallow grave? How quaint, right?

I could make friends, hang out with Clint and Hill on the weekends and not feel like it was work, like it was a lie. I could live my own life when I wasn’t on duty; change my hair, wear whatever clothes I wanted, listen to and read what I wanted, no more contraband, no more restricted lists. I could say, eat, sleep, what, when and with whom I desired, if at all. Nick Fury wouldn’t ever tell me to kill a friend without giving me a reason. He never told Steve to give up and destroy you. I would have. But we’re all a product of our upbringing.”

Nat sighed. “’Of course I don’t work for S.H.E.I.L.D anymore. Turns out its’ core was just as rotten as what I’d run from. I’d traded in the KGB for HYDRA. And guess what, they rescinded their nice retirement plan in the end.

I’ve got the Avengers – what’s left of it. I may have wrecked that with the whole Sokovia Accords. Probably should have locked Steve and Tony in a room until someone gave in and they worked together. I just…I don’t know. I wanted to keep us on the level, in the light. Where we could retain some good will, build up some trust, and gain some leeway in how creative we could be with our orders. We could then choose to be creative in how we followed orders as we preceded. Fury spent his career doing just that. Paid lip service to the company line and then selectively forgot the details he deemed impractical.

If anyone had to sign on for image reasons it was me. After D.C., anything that I’m associated with comes under scrutiny so I’m a liability to the team. Steve sort of understands this, he’s never really liked the spotlight either. But until he took off after you, to the media he was still the Captain America of trading cards and USO shows.  He hadn’t faced public disapproval like my hearing, all anyone saw was a homegrown American hero back from the glory days. Doesn’t matter that Steve Rogers spent the first 25 years of his life a nobody who fought the whole world until he was bruised and bloody and the world just stomped on him harder **.** I don’t think he fully grasped the privilege Captain America gave him to oppose the Accords. Little late now…

Honestly though, I’m surprised my complicated past didn’t come up much during that whole debacle-there was some of it thrown around on talk radio but the pundits mostly chose to dig their talons into Wanda **.** As the new foreign women granted amnesty and a green card by the superhero-industrial complex despite committing atrocities, she got all the vitriol of Limbaugh and his ilk.  God, there was one guy I heard who I swear couldn’t decide what he had a bigger issue with, her Sokovian nationality, her lack of mastery over her powers, or her penchant for short skirts and leather jackets.

For now, things are limping along in Avengers land. But I don’t think it’s ever going to be the same again. I’ve got some personal side work, picking off the poisonous insects of the world. It’s what spiders do best. The bounty I get from these jobs go into a trust I’ve set up through my lawyer Isiah, to aid the families of some of my past political hits. Don’t really know what I’ll do when the Avengers finally do fold, which will happen eventually.”

Bucky absently traced the headboard above him. “I did odd jobs in Bucharest, once I was a little better at being a semi-functional person again. Mechanic, handyman type stuff. It was ok.  I’ve got a whole future now, trying to figure what to do with it. Don’t know what my horizons used to be but I’m not sure that really matters anymore.

He slipped the cigarette back in the pack and tossed it on the nightstand.

“Hard to make plans when we’re in a holding pattern. Steve says he’s done with Captain America but I don’t know exactly how that’s going to pan out. Not sure America’s ready to be done with him. I was listening to music the other day and found this one with the line of, um, ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you’.  So, if Steve is DiMaggio-“

Bucky paused, realizing what he’d just said. “I never in a million years thought I hear that sentence.”

He shook it off. “Like, he represents something the country thinks it lost, right? As if Captain America was ever anything more than a military experiment and propaganda tool as far as Uncle Sam was concerned. Honestly, what I get from the news isn’t really that different from what was going on back in the ‘30s. Maybe people talk about more problems and hear about them faster but-we weren’t as noble as some people seem to think we were. And when Steve isn’t as noble, or noble about the causes they want him to be, well, everybody loves a good scapegoat. I think he’s tired of being a vessel of a country’s fantasies and the recipient of the ire that comes along with it when he doesn’t live up to expectation.     

Of course everything depends on whether or not Steve does end up going to prison for the Raft break. Which would be hilarious given that he broke in and then out of the most super of supermax prisons with other people in tow to boot.  I brought this up the other night at dinner. Sam didn’t find it very funny. I guess he’s right. But he’s got to admit it’s just a little bit funny…” His chuckle slowly dying away into a pregnant silence.

“I’m so fucking scared, Nat.” He said finally, staring off into the distance, his hands still. “I’m exhausted and I’m scared.  I’m more awake than I’ve been in decades and I’m fucking exhausted. I’m 99,” he laughed weakly “and I’m still hung up on a 30 year old – a 30 year old who took a nearly seven decade nap, but…the old days aren’t 4 years ago to me the way they are for him.  I wish I could just fall back into where we left off but neither of us is that guy anymore. The last time things were normal was the night before I shipped out, the night we hauled off to Flushing and I took him “to the future”.

He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob

“That really says it all, doesn’t it? I know I’m not a weapon anymore because weapons don’t appreciate brilliant fucking irony.  We made it to the future before Howard Stark’s stupid flying car did.

It’s been 70 years Nat. 70 years of shit corroding the old stuff. Nightmares creeping in and infecting the memories. I have this one where Steve's coughing in our old apartment, and he suddenly starts to hack up blood, just like his Ma, only his chest is full of bullets instead of TB and I’m holding the gun. And the kicker is that that last part's not even all in my head.”

He swallowed.

“Then there's the one where we’re in bed and he's all little again, 95 lbs sopping wet again and he climbs on top of me and his tongue is in my mouth—God, it’s good—and I wrap my hand, my fucking metal hand, around his throat and I squeeze, slowly but firmly until he starts to gasp, fighting to get free, and I keep tightening and I lift him off my chest to look him in the face so I can see the betrayal in his eyes.  I keep squeezing until his face goes slack and he’s a dead weight on top of me.  And I come so hard I’m thrown awake and have to push actual Steve away and flee to the bathroom before he realizes I’m all sticky. Sticky and sweating and shaking 'cause I do know what it feels like to have my hand wrapped around his throat. ” 

He ran the heel of his hand over his eyes, his breathing ragged.

“Every single time I actually remember something from the past without prompting his stupid, beautiful face lights up like Luna Park and I’d do anything for him. Even the bad nights, when I lie here with him asleep next to me and seriously contemplate ending it, I know I can’t because it would be ending it for him too. He’s told me how low he felt in the two years leading up to D.C. and I know if our places were reversed I wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did.”

He was openly crying now. “I’m so scared I’m going to fuck this up. He made a life here and he set fire to his whole goddamn world for me.  I don’t even know which parts of me are still me and which parts have been obliterated in a furnace. I feel like I’m wearing a dead man’s tags half the time because I miss the guy I think I used to be.  I’m not worth it. He became Captain fucking America in part because of me.  And he may have given up Captain America to get me back. But the man he did all that for doesn't exist anymore and he doesn’t _need_ this me to watch his back anymore—but he won't give up on me even though he really fucking should and I just don't know what to _do_ with that.” 

Nat reached for Bucky and pulled him close, holding him as he sobbed into her shoulder. “I was worried about him before you turned up again.” she began “He was adapting but he was so lonely, so out of place. I could relate.  I tried to help but it wasn't until he saw your face on the bridge that he really started to live like he meant it.  He wanted you so badly I thought he was going to get himself killed trying to chase you down.  I think he may have even hoped that would happen if he didn’t successfully bring you in. But I guess if I had to pick death by fire or death by ice I’d pick fire.  Steve and I have that in common. 

Steve will take you in any form he can get. If he can believe I’m worth it – and he does - he’ll believe you are.  If you can make it through this, he can. If he can make it, you can. Seeing you here, alive, and, not exactly thriving, but _trying_ to move forward and discover the man that you are now;— it gives him hope that he can do it too. Don't doubt how precious that is to him.”

She raked her fingers through his hair, extricating the elastic that had almost slid out. “And if you can keep going, well, then there’s hope that I’ll last a bit longer too.

Sam works at the VA not just because he’s a kind a soul. But because it helps him.Puts his own pain in perspective.  This now? Here?  This is going to help next time I have a bad night.  And I _will_ have another bad night. I accept that.  You remember the name of the farm boy who bled out all over you, right? I bet you do.”

“Emmett.” He choked out. “Emmett Haskell.” 

“Good. Keep his name. Let go of his eyes as he died. I know, you can’t. But tell yourself you remember more about Emmett than just how he died. Pretend if you have to.”

She fit her hand between their chests to grasp his tags. “Sam wears a dead man’s tags. He carries Riley’s memory because he’s still here.  If the Widows had dog tags I’d wear so many…Svetlana could impersonate any one, make you laugh when you felt like shit.  Nadya could cover your six like no one I’ve ever seen.  She looked out for all of us, in a fight and in life.”

Nat snuffled and paused for a moment, tears close. She slowly let herself sink into the sensation, inhabiting the secret space grief had carved-out for itself inside her years ago.

“She died while still in her teens, a bombing”, she said, swallowing badly around the sticky, dry knot lodged in her throat. “It was a joint operation with another Widow. Kseniya screwed up the timer and it went off before they were clear. Kseniya made it out, Nadya didn’t. Of course. It was awhile before I found out. I was already married to Alexei at that point and only learned the news when I returned to the Red Room after his death. I didn’t cry or anything. She’d given me the opportunity to cry when she held me in the infirmary and I hadn’t. Instead I dislocated Kseniya’s shoulder and broke her femur the next time I was in the ring with her.  It’s what you do for friends.

Kseniya was good in a crisis. I miss her too. Superb field medic.  Didn’t help her when she was blown out of the sky flying over Rhapistan, shortly before I defected. There were 28 of us when we started.  There were around half a dozen by the time Kseniya’s locker was cleaned out.” 

She released his tags and allowed herself a few moments to just breathe. She dragged her hand across her eyes and pulled herself together.

“We’re still alive, Bucky. Somehow, even if we don’t deserve it, we’re still here. 

I’ve lived many lives. I’ve watched a lot of people die.  My past has been re-written, re-recorded, re-mixed so many times. Asking myself what would have happened if I’d done things differently gets me nowhere.  Drakov was a powerful man with few weaknesses to exploit whom they needed to sway.  There’s no way his precious little girl would have made it more than a few more years under those circumstances. I can’t claim the moral high ground and make myself believe that I was a kinder assassin than any who would have taken my place.  But I remember her, how she was nice to the quiet new girl across the hall who didn’t know much about music.

I remember them all— _my_ victims, failed operatives like Alexei, the Black Widows. Especially the Widows and all those who, like me, didn’t have anyone else to miss them. Even if some of them never existed exactly as I recall them now.  I accept who they could have been, brief lives with personalities in spite of our handler’s best efforts. 

They say the best revenge is a good life, right?  Fuck that.  Life isn’t revenge.  It’s life and it’s yours to live.

You, me, Steve? We aren’t living out of time.  We just have a more intimate acquaintance with its eccentricities, its relentlessness, and, even on occasion, with its mercy.”

She clasped the sides of his face and gently tilted it up off her shoulder to meet her eyes.

“Look at the two of you. Somehow you fell from Steve’s grasp 70 years through time to give him a reason not to jump now.  Steve froze in a glacier to melt you back into being.  There’s no way in hell any of this could ever be easy.  I’ve never been one for religion or magic but even I see the wonder.  You always stuck around for each other.  Don’t give up now.”

She smiled as she brushed her thumb along his cheekbone, wiping tears away.  “Two smart ass kids, one of whom no one expected to live to see 30 much less 98, who tore around Vinegar Hill pretending they were Buck Rogers actually made it to the 21st Century.  Get out there and raise hell.” 

Bucky let out small breathy laugh. “Yes, ma’am.” He laced his fingers with hers, his breath steadying.

“You stick around too, alright?  Hell will be a lot more fun with you around.”

“It certainly was the first time.  Now I have a small furry demon and a laser pointer. You like cats?”

“I guess so…”

“Good. You’ll have to come by and meet Liho sometime. She’s judgmental but generally accepting of those who give her attention.”

Bucky’s mouth twitched into a smile.

“We made it out too. You and me.” Bucky thought over the words. “We blew what felt like our one chance to get out however many years ago and yet we’re here now.  We really fucking did it.” 

“Well, I mean, you did shoot me in between…”

“Aw, do you have to kill the moment-“

“Twice.”

“So we weren’t romantic types. Geez, somehow I feel like you’re the kind of girl marksmanship would impress more than flowers.”

“You’re not wrong. But that hurt like a bitch. Both times.” 

“Fine, I’ll take you to the damn movies. We can throw popcorn at Steve and Sam.  I’ve been feeling like the third wheel lately. I mean, it’s not like they make out in front of me but you can tell they want to.” 

“Oh, saddest song. Smallest violin.” 

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in…”

“He loves you, Bucky.  You boys just have some remarkable issues of distance and timing to work through.”

“Tell me about it.” 

“Another time. Think I’m beginning to fade. My serum doesn’t keep me from needing to sleep.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to feel drowsy. Promise me one thing, Nat?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t go back to the couch. Be here when I wake up?”

“Of course.”

He kissed the back of her hand, then pulled the covers over them with his free hand.  Nat drifted awhile, trying not to fall too deeply asleep.  She knew he was waiting and wanted to try to wait with him. 

As a bluish haze was cast across the room, the sky outside the room streaked with pinky gold, she felt Bucky shift onto his back, still holding her hand.  Through sleep heavy lids she watched him turn his head to the window. 

“Daybreak” he said. She felt his whole body relax, relieved at the banality of the word. “Daybreak”. 

With that Bucky finally fell asleep and Nat followed suit.                                                                                                                                                                        

**Author's Note:**

> (contains a spoiler for season 1 of _Agent Carter ___and for some Black Widow comic plot points)  
>   
>  • Cindy Moon, aka Silk, has not met the Black Widow in comic canon but I couldn’t resist the idea of Natasha being at least casually acquainted with Cindy, Jessica Drew (Spider Woman), and Gwen Stacey (Spider Gwen) since they all share spider monikers. It’s a harsh, male dominated world out there – female superheroes need to network and support each other.  
>   
> • Homage to the _West Wing ___where Josh Lyman has two different therapists over the course of the series, both of whom are named Stanley.  
>   
>  • Bucky’s story about Sarah is taken from my own neighborhood. My mom grew up with kids who had a much older brother, the product of their mother’s first marriage, just before the war (in this instance WWII rather than Sarah Rogers’ WWI). This woman had married in her late teens and gotten pregnant shortly before her husband shipped out and died in the War. She was treated like a “loose woman” even though hadn’t conceived until after she was married. This story makes me so angry because even when you play by the rules, society still looks down on you because the game was never yours to win. This struck as relevant to Steve and Bucky’s outlook on life.  
> 
> 
> • The Birth Control Federation of America changed its name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.  
> • Evgeniya Drakova is intended as “Drakov's daughter” referenced by Loki in the _Avengers ___. Ditto “the hospital fire” Natasha mentions later in the story. To be clear, Loki does not know about Bucky’s involvement in the latter as, to my way of thinking, Clint does not know that part of the story.  
>   
>  • Marc Bolan died in September of 1977. Tupac Shakur died in September of 1996.  
>   
> • Alexei Shostakov appears in some comics as Natasha’s first husband. His death, unbeknownst to Natasha, was faked and he continued on as the Red Guardian, a Soviet costumed super soldier response to Captain America. I have altered this story a bit and do not feel the Red Guardian fits into this heavily MCU world as his story ran decades before the conception of the Winter Soldier as a character.  
>   
> • Natasha partnered with and dated Matt Murdock aka Daredevil in several comics.  
>   
> • Natasha’s pregnancy is from _The Name of the Rose ___, in which she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl when she was 16 during WWII. Read this comic, it is my favorite Black Widow storyline.  
>   
>  • I give full credit to [Femme_Daltia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Femme_Daltia) for the “This one time at assassin camp” line, first uttered as we waited on line outside the Catacombs of Paris.  
>   
> • Natalia is a name often given to girls born in December, similar to Noelle.  
>   
> • Molly McIntire, Susan Shapiro, and Linda Rinaldi from Jefferson City, Illinois. Couldn’t resist an American Girl tie in.  
>   
> • I find it hard to believe the Red Room handcuffed the baby Widows to their beds every night. Creating the habit seen in _Agent Carter ___where Dottie Underwood handcuffs herself to her bed nightly compromises her ability to react to danger when she first wakes up.  
>   
>  • Bellevue Insane Pavilion, opened in 1879, later reincorporated as Bellevue Psychiatric in 1931, is a notorious mental hospital along the East River in Manhattan. Most of the Beat Generation passed through there at some point or another.  
>   
> • Bucky’s use of the expression “lit up like Luna Park” refers to old Luna Park out at Coney Island, closed in 1946. The current Luna Park (uses the FunnyFace logo from old Steeplechase Park) opened in 2010 (my brother and I were there opening weekend!) on the site of what was Astroland during my childhood.  
>   
> • Liho, the cat who adopts Natasha when she is living in Little Ukraine (ie. the East Village in vicinity of 2nd Ave/Bowrey), appears in the _Finely Woven Web/The Tightly Tangled Web/Last Days ___.


End file.
